Review - We Shall Be No MoreSuicide and Self-Government in the Newly United Statesby Richard BellHarvard University Press, 2012Review by Ralph Harrington, Ph.D.Oct 9th 2012 (Volume 16, Issue 41)

It is not often that a suicide's right to take their own life is questioned today, when the burden of sympathy is overwhelmingly with the person who has chosen to take the drastic course of ending his or her own life. In most jurisdictions there are no longer legal penalties attached to suicide, either attempted or successful, and nor do the families of suicides face sanctions such as the sequestration of the deceased's property. It seems that is only in the private realm of the family that the right of an individual to kill themselves is questioned. I have heard the child of a suicide, in the midst of most painful and self-reproaching grief, condemn their dead mother for taking it upon herself to end her life with (it seemed to those left behind) no thought of the consequences for others: 'She can't have really loved me or she would not have done it. She had no right to do it.' Witnessing such suffering and hearing such words brings home the reality behind the old, harsh label for the act of suicide: self-murder.

Western society sympathizes with the private grief of those left behind by suicide, but provides no institutionalized or corporate echo of their sentiments. Suicide is now an entirely private decision: to be regretted, certainly, to be discouraged, in so far as it is possible, but not in itself to be condemned. The social and political rise of Western individualism has produced the ultimate paradox: a society which is prepared to contemplate with equanimity the destruction of the individual, provided that it is the individual concerned who freely performs the act of destruction.

Richard Bell's vivid, absorbing and richly evidenced study of the moral, social and political significance of suicide in the early years of the American Republic presents the reader with a very different world. In late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century America suicide was far from being a quintessentially private and personal matter. It was an act with profound societal ramifications, one which threatened to undermine the fragile social contract underpinning a newly-created and politically turbulent nation. 'The many instances of Suicide which have lately occurred, present a most horrible and alarming proof of the increasing depravity and irreligion of the times', declared a Boston newspaper in 1807, neatly summarizing the twin objections to suicide held by many contemporaries: that it represented moral turpitude and Godlessness, failings no society which sought to base itself on firm and enduring foundations could ignore. Drawing on a vast range of evidence, Bell reveals the extent to which politicians, religious figures and judicial authorities were united by the perception that, far from being an individual private matter, suicide (widely believed at the time to be becoming ever more prevalent) was, as much as murder, riot or arson, an innately socially destructive act which constituted a grave threat to the newly United States. Yet was not individual liberty the founding principle of that young nation? Suicide could be seen as a logical and defensible expression of the 'inalienable right' of liberty possessed by each individual. This was a society in which powerful contrary currents were at work, fed by the politics of liberty and the rise of romanticism and the cult of individual sensibility in contemporary letters.

In some of the most fascinating passages of this book, Bell recounts how thousands were swept away by the international literary sensation that was Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther; they read of Werther's suicide and resolved to do likewise. Beset by the miseries of life -- love, penury, loneliness, or simply a fashionable generalized despair -- young Americans sought to ennoble and render meaningful their sorrows through self-destruction, just as Werther had ennobled his. Such was the influence of Goethe's book, records Bell, that young men were reported to be dressing like Werther (blue tailcoat, yellow waistcoat) before putting pistols to their temples. Nor, concerned observers reflected, was Werther the only influential text: the sentimental novels that sold in their thousands were filled with romanticized acts of self-murder. Suicide was both a cultural and a political phenomenon.

In dissecting that phenomenon, Richard Bell brilliantly situates suicide in the particular political and social circumstances of the early United States, relating the issues raised by this 'most extreme and irrevocable' of acts to the self-fashioning of a nation newly emerging from war and political turmoil. At the heart of contemporary political debate lay precisely the questions of individual liberty and collective responsibility, moral conduct and regulation, sensibility and sentimentality, that governed the deed of suicide and society's response to it. His book is an important contribution to the historiography of suicide and casts a new and revelatory light upon the culture and history of the young American Republic.

Ralph Harrington, Ph.D. is a historian who has researched, lectured and published on medical history and the history of trauma, among other topics. His web site is at http://harringtonmiscellany.wordpress.com/

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